@kb1337

1 year ago

Hey, one of the Kkrieger devs here... There's a bunch of stuff that comes up a lot in the comments, so let's address that :) "Where is this technology nowadays?" It exists. It's called Substance Designer (made by different people than us, and now owned by Adobe), and it's pretty much the same thing we did back then - artist driven procedural texture generation, and used everywhere in games, animated video and VFX. But usually it's used to generate the textures offline, which are then stored as normal images in the game data along with everything else. Which brings us to the next question: "Why aren't games nowadays using it?" Several reasons. The biggest one: It's a giant load of hard, unintuitive work. You can for example easily make a concrete texture with it, but it takes hours and hours of painstakingly tweaking numbers until you arrive at anything worthwhile. You know what's way faster? Going outside, taking a picture of a concrete wall, loading that into Photoshop and tweaking it a bit. And that's not lazy by the way - game devs are already working overtime for months and years, and y'all probably wouldn't want games to take three times as long to develop just to save some HD space. And there's also a technical reason: This tech (ours, Substance, doesn't really matter) is way, WAY slower than just loading an asset from disk. You'd pay for the saved space with ridiculous loading times, and you also can't stream stuff in while the game is running, because generating the textures takes a lot of GPU and would seriously impact frame rate. Imagine the micro stutters everyone's complaining about, just ten times worse. "You're just using the DirectX libraries, that's cheating" Oh great, THAT "point" again. Er, no. As in yes, we're using DirectX (as in Direct3D, DirectSound and DirectInput) but because that's how you get your GPU to draw polygons and run shaders, your sound card to output sound, and how you get input from the keyboard and mouse. That's it. DirectX isn't an "engine", all the meshes, textures, lighting, shadows, effects, music, SFX, etc. come 100% from our code, and the only asset that comes out of Windows is the font used for the menu and HUD (Arial with a bunch of effects on top :) ). If this still had been the DOS days where you had to program the hardware directly, Kkrieger wouldn't perhaps be 96k but still not significantly bigger, and it would only run on one specific model of GPU and sound card. So, no. There's definitely a full engine in there that works similar to what Doom3 did back in the day (direct per-pixel Phong lighting, stencil shadows, etc), just slower, because optimizing for performance would be way more code. "That sound clearly isn't MIDI" Yes and no. We're not talking about General MIDI as in "let's play a .mid file", but MIDI the protocol that sends musical notes to a synthesizer. The actual audio is coming out of a realtime software synthesizer (you might call it "virtual analog") that's part of the Kkrieger code, and MIDI is only used to store the musical score. I chose MIDI back then because that enabled us to use a normal audio tool (DAW) for creating the audio with the synthesizer running as a plugin. Export a .mid file from it, add the synth code and the sound bank, enjoy the music and sound effects. "Where are those guys now?" We exist, living our lives, all outside actual game development nowadays (because we wanted to have lives), but still quietly working away on various things that you might or might not have seen. Some of us are still active in the demoscene, and we're all fine, thank you :)

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